


the new jerusalem

by curiouslyfic



Category: Transmetropolitan
Genre: Future Fic, Gen, Pre-Canon, Yuletide 2008
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-03-16
Updated: 2011-03-16
Packaged: 2017-10-17 01:11:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,622
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/171319
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/curiouslyfic/pseuds/curiouslyfic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's not that he doesn't care. It never has been.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the new jerusalem

**Author's Note:**

  * For [JediLora](https://archiveofourown.org/users/JediLora/gifts).



> Lightning fast beta by daluci.

He still thinks in columns. Can't make himself stop.

.

 _One per cent._

 _The grace of God, if I can take that shit seriously, comes as one fucking per cent, a strange gift of fate that gives me everything I've ever dreamed. No politics, no City, nothing but the stretch of grass and the sounds of wildness crouching in, my own protective barrier._

 _The weasels say hello. I've fucking missed them._

.

They say you only look back when you can't look forward. He'd argue--he always does--but it's possible they're right. He'll know soon enough, barreling forward into the shit-covered brick wall of hell that is age, a tar pit lined with adulterous doghumper brides of Christ and when he gets there, slams face first, he's sure the years of accumulated misery he's steeped in will keep him alive just long enough to truly hate it.

He hates everything. Always has, always will, curse of having a heart. Using it. Burnt out and dead on the world by five and he might've been all right, too numb and fucked and bled dry by everything to do much but wallow in self-aggrandizing bullshit or pump himself dosed, be one of those shallow ambitious assholes paving The City's streets in cum-drenched whore.

Thing is, he didn't. He's always been smart--smarter than this shit, anyway, he has his mountain and not even Royce can say that; he took down the Smiler and the Beast and big chunks of Fred Christ, what the fuck else could he accomplish?--but he curses the goiter of fate that left him Not Smart Enough.

Because he's in politics, isn't he? Dragged in, sucked down, swallowed like semen on a lunch break, fast and obvious and dirty.

He hasn't had an option. Not in years, and if he could, he'd kick his own ass, blast himself Prolapse until his stupid younger self gets the fuck over it, heads back to sports. Sports, where all you can do is hurl unearned obscenities at the egotistical fucks parading around their imported harems, carving the hearts out of fans and fucking the stumps.

.

Spider's an idealist.

.

If he could, he'd turn himself off. The world sucks more daily and he knows he'll burn out. He doesn't owe them that, the blank-eyed masses who swallow bullshit like pap, like they can't tell it tastes wrong. If they're going to be that stupid, they deserve what they get.

.

It's not that he doesn't care. It never has been.

.

"Caring is for assholes. First rule of the game."

It's the kind of advice no kid wants to hear, the kind every kid needs, and it comes in place of introduction. This is J-school and he's already sick. It's not hate yet, not yet, but it will be. His prof's a bitter man who reeks of swill, the sort of flesh-stripping whiskey that lives on the streets. The festering scent of the docks.

.

 _"You've got the sickness, boy. You need the Truth."_

 _I can hear the capital letter. It fills me with hate._

 _"The only way to fight it is with heavy narcotics."_

 _I dose myself up and get on with life._

 _It has sweet fuck all to do with politics._

.

He's not sure why he doesn't leave, blow his time and money elsewhere, but he thinks that's the sickness.

.

 _He's not my idol. He's not my mentor. I'm not sure what he is, except he's there, snarling furious when we're docile, childish glee when we fight._

 _"You can only do this job while you love it," he says._

 _"And if we don't?"_

 _"Hate," he smiles. Tips an ash then flicks his cigarette at my head. The guy beside me squeals when it hits him instead. "That's the best kind of love, Jerusalem."_

.

He knows he'll be a journalist like he knows what he's meant to write. It's not that he likes it, just that he's self-aware, but he wants a fighting chance at something else. Something pleasant. He tries to evade.

Fuck it, he's Spider fucking Jerusalem, he'll write what he wants.

And what he wants has nothing to do with the festering wounds of politics.

.

He doesn't want a job, he wants a bowel disruptor and a life far away, somewhere the stench of stupidity won't touch him. It's a pipe dream, sure, but he's good at those, even if he won't admit it.

.

When he starts at The Word, he's one of a half-dozen sports slugs. The department's a pit, two AL gorillas and a feedwhore cracked out on East Division stats, an itinerant Czech who mainlines hockey, and him. He shows up early his first day, dressed tolerably and ready to work, running through standings while he rides upstairs. He walks in to find the AL gorillas humping to gamefeed replays. East Division vomits on his shoes. The itinerant Czech rants in a language he doesn't speak, punctuated with meaty fists slammed on his desk, and it's all Spider can do not to wipe the sprayed spit from his face with the bloody pulp of the Czech's scalp. The humping slows long enough to call him a fucking overachiever, then starts again with obnoxious brays Spider really wants to stop.

They don't tell him where to find coffee or the good drugs, so he wanders off twenty minutes into his day and finds himself on the wrong floor, hip-deep in the biological waste that is The Word's news room. They're as dead-eyed as the rest, zealous for bylines and scrapping for glory, but they don't give two fetid shits about the truth.

He's never early again.

.

Sports is all right once he finds his feet. He comes in late, bitchslaps his editor when the man babbles things like "missed" and "deadline" and "fired", and when he's forced, actually heads out to watch games. It takes him two weeks to compile a dossier, a mental closet of every skeleton his athletes have, and by the end of the season, he owns them all.

What he learns most in sports, strictly speaking, is the public's appetite for blood, how fast they turn on their heroes when a streak goes bad, how much they love when he throws away the ghost of objectivity. He could get used to that.

.

He covers things that don't matter, not on any grand scale. It's better that way, almost tolerable, because he can stomach--mostly--how it feels when they prove that they're listening. Every reader's a gain and hell, he's not calling them to action--mostly--so it's almost a victory when they act, anyway, fist-thumping rage over standings.

He tries not to think about what he could be writing, the Truths he could spread, because it will kill him every time he's ignored. There's only so much a body can take, even his, and if the world's going to shit, he's more than happy to let it. He'll watch the thing burn fucked out of his skull on the itch-burn of chemicals and the sweet sting of irony.

.

He spends a year in sports, writing about drunken athletes and their parade through the courts. There's an astonishing range of ways they fuck themselves over and the people react, hurl invective with a passion rarely-riled. They hate things, fans, and they're not shy about saying so. He loves that.

Wishes he could stay.

They bloody up a small forward to end the losing streak, martyr to the cause of righteous Big Four victory, and he's pretty sure it won't work but he doesn't say anything. The longer he works this beat, the more he wishes he belonged. It would be so fucking comfortable to stay here but he knows he can't.

.

 _I meet Royce on assignment. He's honing in on my turf, wearing his press badge and stalking some stray-haired bastard in a ridiculous suit. No one ties it up to go to the hardcourt but this asshole is and so does his team, blur-suited assholes and the blank-eyed herd of what's probably meant to be media._

 _The paper leaves politics in the hands of Mitchell Royce, who proves himself unending disappointment with everything he doesn't ask. Same fucking questions as everyone else, same fucking lies, and it burns and burns, an itch in my brain, to beg him to stop. Politics isn't meant to be covered in diplomacy, it's meant to be an all-out war._

.

The words bleed out like the venom does, a rush of hate he shapes by keystroke. He's been a mighty soldier for Truth and it's burnt up everything in him, assraped whatever ambition he had and crushed his heart whole in its unrelenting fist for Justice.

He's not Superman. Never wanted to be. That sad and sorry fuck blew all his best years on kitties stuck up in trees, blew all his best bylines on corporations.

Spider may not like what the world's done to his life, pushed him to insurgence because none of his fucking idolizing readers could be columned into action, but at least he's got that, a perversely pure portfolio.

.

 _I took up politics because I had no choice. It's what I was made for. The Print District thrives on digital lies and more I lived in it, the more it enraged me. I thought crusades and covered sports and told myself it was for the best. No good comes of politics, not of letting them run my life, and I knew it like I knew I'd miss the free drugs from the press box at games and I couldn't say no._

 _The fucking Truth won't let me._

.

He hates the world because he gives two shits. He really wishes he didn't. Not seeing the wreck of things, the City's inner rot, the scum-filled streets of industry and the people they forget, that's fucking bliss and he knows it. Long before there's a transient culture to stand behind Fred Christ like lemmings to the cliff, there's demographics to abuse in the endless hunt for power and it sickens him to the bones that no one pays attention, that no one ever looks.

Numbness takes the hard news corps, the apathy of public relations and things they won't write.

He doesn't know how they stand it.

.

 _Journalism is throwing yourself against solid rock and praying it won't break you. It does. Of course it does. That's how the fucking game's played, how the new kids crop up, and I hate that, too. If guys like me didn't burn out on the whole squalid mess, there wouldn't be room in the headlines for Yelena. There's only so much Truth-spewing misery they can take._

.

He tells them and tells them and tells them and they won't fucking listen. He drags them down with his words, uses them as weapons, and eventually he thinks he's lost everything soft about himself in his need to write razor, like all he is, is hate. Every thought cuts, every phrase slices, and they idolize him for the things he writes but he swears they don't read. If they are, there's sure as fuck no comprehension.

.

The world he knows will end someday on the strength of his words. He wonders what will replace it.

As it turns out, nothing better. He's getting tired of typing insurrection.

.

 _Then I'm exalted, held up on high because I ask the right questions for a public dogfuck, misadventures in honesty._

 _"It's. The. Beast." I say when Royce looks at me shifty, like I'm stealing his beat, because I still don't want it. I'm happy in sports, where every game means free drugs and time with the crackwhores of publicity, who'll let me fuck them raw. The only festering disease that scares me is political ambition, an outbreak the Word's lawyers make me swear I won't contain. I should never have let them see the diagrams, because I could have taken out half of Washington before anyone caught on._

 _"It's you, Jerusalem," Royce says and he sounds like a scowl. Royce would like to contain me. Maybe someday he will. I assume I'll be sucked into politics by then._

.

Royce says, "So we're saving the world?"

"Let them save themselves." He almost means it.

.

They make him bring down the Beast, who's wholly scum but like the fickle fucks they are, first they elect the bastard President. He files the column--fuckfuckfuck--and hides out in his office, drunk and curled up, awaiting inevitable explosion. The end of the world.

Two terms later, they make him do it again.

Clearly, they're not fucking learning.

.

His heart keeps breaking, worn down by injustice, and he hates thinking he's one of those pricks, a liberal crusader, but he is. The thing he hates first is himself.

Turns out, he's really good at that.

.

 _I hate the world in self defense. They love me for it._

 _They also still won't listen._

.

There's so much fucking wrong and he can't ignore any of it, not while he's there wading through the misery. It's different, better, when he's pulled back to his mountain, where nothing touches him unless he invites contact and this last time, until it's gone past Channon.

There are days he thinks Channon knows, which really wouldn't surprise him. She knows everything else, except maybe this, his fucking one per cent miracle, and if she knows that, too, it's no big deal. Not nearly the disaster it could be because he's sure she'll keep his peace.

So it's funny as hell when he realizes she means Yelena. They haven't exactly been subtle.

.

Channon has the plants and what's left of her book. Yelena goes tattoo-happy and shaves off her hair, oblivious to the roots of his style. It suits her, combat boots and trenchcoat and flinty-eyed reprieve, and he's not supposed to know she wants to go back but he does. He even understands it.

.

 _Royce says, "Spider, I promise we won't keep her," with that faint humour everyone's got now that I'm gone. Six months ago I held his career by the nuts, gave his ethics a highly-public prostate exam and broadcast the results, a steady stream of Smiler-toppling news washing up in the feeds._

 _Damned right he won't. I don't plan to let him._

.

Yelena sleeps on the couch, doused and drowsy in sunlight. Her hand curls by her face. Her legs shift beneath her blanket. Channon's fucked off to write her book, which gives him time he shouldn't have to watch his girl sleep. They're both his, of sorts, moreso than the produce, and it's strangely gratifying to see what he does, how fast her scowl fades when she's not trying.

When she's awake, she's all hard words and cutting looks and an urgent need to column. He knows how that goes, remembers his early days, and wonders if she's ready. She's one of his, which means she has more experience than the rest of the newsroom combined, and she'll have Royce there, too, with his feckless editor's eye, for all the help that gives her. Spider wants to press his memories into her like shields, a path of most resistance, but there's that fucking one per cent secret he's got, so that's out.

She's not supposed to know he's here, and if she's been good enough to ignore his slips, he's not going to force it. If nothing else, it's the only way he knows to make sure she sometimes leaves the City.

.

 _Her father's right. Fighting political is a disease, one I've always thought would kill me. I've just barely survived--fucking one per cent--and that's as much sheer dumb luck as it is iPollen._

.

All he can do now is make sure it doesn't get Yelena.

  



End file.
